Pursuit of a Parcel: An Ernest Lamb Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “That has nothing to do with you—do you hear? I shall take her away and we shall be gone. You will not see us again—you will not hear of us. You will be quite safe, quite free—as long as you hold your tongue. You can say to yourself that it was a bad dream from which you have waked up. Your husband will come home and all will be well. Unless you are such a foolish woman that you talk. Then you will ruin your sister, who will go to a concentration camp, and your husband, who will lose his practice, and yourself because he will separate himself from you, and you are so fond of him that that will break you up. You do not wish all this ruin, do you? Then you have only to hold your tongue. One word to your husband, to your best friend, and the ruin is there. Do not cry about it afterwards when it is too late. No one will be able to help you then, but now you can help yourself. You can keep back the words that would ruin you. You can be silent, and you can begin by not asking questions. It is your business to feed Miss Merridew and get her strong enough to go with me. I cannot drug her again, so I shall be obliged to put a gag in her mouth. You will tell her this beforehand and advise her not to resist. I do not want her to struggle and perhaps to faint again. Tell her it is just a precaution, and that she must tell us what we want to know and then she will be quite safe.”

  Ina jerked up her head and stared at him. Her tears had ceased. She said with a kind of desperate courage,

  “Would that be true?”

  His face did not change at all. He stared back at her contemptuously. “Why shouldn’t it be true?” he said.

  Ina Long did as she was told. She went upstairs looking like a ghost. She sat down on the end of the bed and showed Delia a white, frightened face.

  “They’re going to take you away,” she said in a whisper.

  Delia said, “When?”

  She had put on her skirt and jumper, and her shoes and stockings. Her big coat lay in a heap on the ottoman. Anyone might think that the other things were still there, concealed by its folds. She had had a good meal and she was feeling a good deal more equal to coping with Barend Roos, and quite, quite determined not to tell him anything that he wanted to know. She looked at Ina with young impatience. Gosh—what a dreep! Why didn’t she do something instead of going down the drain?

  Ina sniffed miserably and said,

  “Some time after eight. It’s nearly seven now.”

  Delia frowned. There was at least an hour. You could do a lot in an hour. She said,

  “What is this place? Are there other houses near?”

  Ina looked down at her hands. She had long, pale fingers which moved continually, weaving in and out, twisting. She said in a choked voice, “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because if there are—”

  Ina interrupted her passionately.

  “It’s no good—I can’t do anything!”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. I only want a chance to get away. You can help me to do that.”

  “I can’t—I can’t!”

  Delia leaned right forward and caught at the twisting fingers.

  “Do stop saying ‘I can’t’! Just think what you’ll feel like when they’ve murdered me and you wake up in the night and you think you might have stopped them. You’ll feel like a murderess—anyone would—and when your husband comes home there’ll be an awful secret between you always. Do you think you’ll be able to stand it?”

  Ina shook her head. “No—it would kill me.”

  “Then let’s have a stab at getting away. You go down and talk to them about something—anything. Get up an argument. Let them think they’ve got to persuade you. I’ll come down after you and get out of a window in front of the house. They’re at the back, aren’t they? Give me five minutes, and then let them think you’ve given in. Say you must go back to me. But you won’t go upstairs—you’ll get out of the window, and we’ll get away. See if we don’t!”

  “No—no—” The words were just a broken murmur. The hands pulled away from Delia. Then in a sharp whisper she said, “He’s going to gag you.”

  Delia’s spine crept. She said, “Nonsense!”

  Ina stared at her with pale, miserable eyes.

  “He said I was to tell you. He said you mustn’t resist, and you must tell them whatever it is they want to know. And then you will be all right.”

  “I should be dead,” said Delia in a scornful voice. “The very minute they got what they wanted they’d want to get rid of me. You must see that.”

  Ina got up off the bed and backed away from her. When she got to the door she stood there for a moment staring. Then she said, “No—no—they’ll let you go. He said they would,” and ran out of the room.

  “I might as well expect help from a jellyfish,” Delia told herself. For the moment she was more exasperated than frightened. Before the daylight went she had found out as much about her surroundings and the position of the house as the view from the windows could afford. This room looked upon the garden, a rambling old-fashioned place with a great many trees in it. There was no sign of any other house, and no possibility of climbing out of the window. When she leaned out she could hear the men’s voices from the room below.

  She slipped into a front bedroom and looked out from there. If there was a road, the house stood back from it and it could not be seen. There was a gravelled drive, more trees, and a great many shrubs. The window was much too high from the ground to make her feel that she would have any chance of reaching it without a broken limb. As to the time-honoured expedient of tearing a sheet into strips and making a knotted rope of the pieces, it was entirely impracticable without Ina Long’s connivance, since she was never out of the room for more than five minutes at a time. If Ina did connive, it was quite unnecessary, and it would be so much simpler to walk downstairs and get out of a window on the ground floor.

  But now what? Ina was a wash-out. The one and only person she could rely on was Delia Merridew. It was up to Delia Merridew not to get murdered. In the first place because it would be so rotten for Antony, and secondly because—well, because—She put Antony first, but she was prepared to risk Antony and herself for the other reason. But she wasn’t prepared just to sit here in bed for seventy crawling minutes until Cornelius came and put a gag in her mouth, and took her away to goodness knew where, and tried to make her tell him something she didn’t know. It was a most revolting thought. The only alternative that presented itself was to carry out the plan she had proposed to Ina, but with Ina left out of it.

  There wasn’t much chance of its succeeding. She faced that. With Ina to shut the consulting-room door and hold the men’s attention for five minutes, it would have been a certainty, but without Ina it was about three to one against it coming off. All the same she was bound to try. If Cornelius was planning to start soon after eight, he would be planning to have some sort of meal before he started. The best time for her to try and get away would be as soon as they had gone into the dining-room to have their meal. But that meant she would have to get out at the back. She wouldn’t dare risk the other front room just across the hall. The window might creak—

  The next half hour was dreadfully long. She kept thinking, “Perhaps I’d better go now,” and, “Why didn’t I try it before?” She got as far as the door once and stood there listening. And heard one of the men cross the hall. Ina Long came up every few minutes. The last time she brought a cup of soup. Her face was flushed as if she had been cooking. She said something about men making a lot of work in the house and went out again. Delia thought, “Now they’ll be having their supper. She’s been cooking it.”

  She drank the soup. Then she put on her coat and went to the door again. She opened it and listened. In about five minutes she heard Ina go through to the front of the house. Then she heard her come back and call out to the men, and she heard them all go back across the hall.

  She thought, “I’ll count a hundred, and then I’ll go.” All the time she was counting, her feet and her hands were getting colder and colder. When she said ninety-nine, a st
ab of fear went through her like a knife. She said one hundred, and came out on the landing in her stocking feet with her shoes in her left hand. The really frightful think was that one of the stairs creaked and she wasn’t sure which it was. It was quite near the top, because she had heard it every time anyone went up or down. It might be the second step, the third, or the fourth, or even a little farther down, but not much.

  She sat down on the top step and lowered herself sitting to the next. Things don’t creak so much if you can spread the weight. The second step was all right. She came down on to the third, and heard it give a muffled creak. The stab went through her again. Had anyone heard it? They couldn’t. It was only a ghost of a squeak, and her coat had smothered it.

  She moved to the fourth step, and then got to her feet. The stair turned half way, and as soon as she got round the curve she could see into the hall. It was of a good size, square, with the front door facing her and two other doors opening off to right and left of it. An octagonal lantern hung from the ceiling. Its glass panels had been covered with green paper, but it gave enough light to see by.

  Delia came down the rest of the way. Just before she reached the bottom she saw that the dining-room door was ajar. She could see a bright crack running all the way down from the top to the bottom of the jamb. No, not a crack. It was wider than that—two inches—a hands-breadth—

  The door wasn’t ajar, it was opening. She jumped the last step and ran to the back of the house. It wasn’t any good—she knew that. But you have to try. If the consulting-room door had been open—But it wasn’t. They had shut it. Even as she wrenched at it, Barend’s hand came down on her shoulder. It held her, turned her round, kept her there pressed back against the door to face him. Then, before either of them could speak, the sharp sound of an electric bell came rasping through the house.

  Chapter Twenty

  The sound was repeated. Barend Roos brought his hand down hard over Delia’s mouth. He must have turned the knob of the door, for she felt it give way behind her. Next moment they were inside the room in the dark with the door ajar, and she was being held so tightly that she could neither move nor make a sound.

  In the dining-room Ina Long had got to her feet, but Jimmy Nash was before her at the door. He had drunk a lot of whisky, but it would have taken a good deal more to have drugged his sense of danger. He caught Ina by the arm, his face pale and his eyes blinking.

  “What’s at the bottom of the garden?”

  She stared at him stupidly. The bell rang again.

  “What’s at the bottom of the garden, out there at the back?”

  She said, “A kind of lane. It’s a right of way.”

  He gave her a push towards the hall.

  “Call out and say you’re coming! I’m off. Make a bit of time for me!”

  He ran past her and was gone. She heard him on the stair going down to the basement. Then she called out,

  “I’m coming. Just a minute.”

  Her hands fumbled with the chain, and the bolt at the bottom of the door. It was stiff. Even if Jimmy had not told her to make time, she could not have been very quick over it. It was stiff, and it hurt her fingers. She got it back and stood up with a little exclamation of pain. Someone was using the knocker now. She said, “It’s all right. The bolt’s stiff.” And then she was turning the key and the door swung in. The porch was full of men. Before any of them spoke she knew that they were the police, and that meant it was all over. Clara, Ernest, Delia, herself—nothing that she could do would either help them or hurt them now. It was out of her hands. For the moment she was past feeling anything but relief. She stood there looking at them with her tear-reddened eyes, and Inspector Lamb walked into the hall and said,

  “Mrs. Long?”

  “Yes.”

  The other men had come in too—Sergeant Abbott, Antony Rossiter, and a constable.

  “I have some enquiries to make.”

  In the consulting-room Delia was holding on to herself. If she couldn’t see or make a sound, she could hear. She heard Jimmy’s steps go down into the basement, she heard a door pulled open and left to swing on its hinges, she heard him go down the garden. She heard Ina Long at the front door, and Inspector Lamb speaking with the measured voice of authority. The man who was holding her heard it too. She could feel him stiffen. She did the only thing she could think of. She drew in her breath in a long sigh, her head fell back, and she went limp and heavy in his grasp. And insensibly that grasp became less strenuous. His arms still held her, but for a moment the pressure on her mouth was relaxed. In that moment she bit, and bit hard. The hand flinched away, and Delia screamed.

  It was a good scream. She had filled her lungs so as to be ready for it, and it was a superlatively good scream.

  She was flung violently to the ground. If she hadn’t let herself go limp, it would have hurt more. She bumped her shoulder and her head. There was a moment of confusion, a hurry of men going past her. Someone called out. There was a smash of breaking glass, and a voice that cursed furiously in a foreign tongue. As she struggled up, Detective Inspector Lamb came over the threshold and switched on the light. Three men heaved and strained over by the window. They reminded Delia vaguely of the Laocoön. Her head was feeling like that. It took in surface impressions like pictures.

  Inspector Lamb didn’t think anything about the struggling group at all. He plunged in and became part of it. After a few vigorous and noisy moments a handcuffed figure emerged, Lamb’s hand upon its shoulder. Lamb’s voice, stolid and unhurried, rehearsed the ritual of arrest. Sergeant Abbott smoothed back his unruffled hair and straightened a tie which might have been a quarter of an inch out of line.

  Antony came over to Delia and caught her in his arms, and Delia disgraced herself by bursting into tears.

  He pulled her into the passage and kissed her as vehemently as if there hadn’t been a policeman in the house. He managed to talk all the time as well, but so incoherently that he never dared to remember what he had said. The only comfort was that Delia was in no case to remember it either, and everyone else’s attention was urgently taken up with other things—or at least he devoutly hoped so.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No—no, I’m not.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  Delia gave an irrepressible sob.

  “Because I want to.”

  “And you’re not hurt? You swear they didn’t hurt you?”

  She said with a sudden steadying of her voice,

  “I think he was going to murder me—I really do. He knew I’d opened the parcel, but he wouldn’t believe there wasn’t any cylinder inside it.”

  Antony gave a rather shaky laugh.

  “There never was a cylinder—I’m sure of it. Con was spoofing them.”

  She pulled away to look into his face.

  “Cornelius—but he said—he talked—as if the cylinder had really been there.”

  “Who did?”

  She made a motion towards the consulting-room.

  “Cornelius.”

  Antony said, “Cornelius is dead.”

  “Oh!”

  “They got him. And when they thought they’d got the parcel with the cylinder they shot him. And when they found out that the cylinder wasn’t there they thought you’d taken it out.”

  Delia shook her head.

  “I didn’t.” She put her lips close up against Antony’s ear and whispered, “I only took out the papers.”

  “What!”

  “Ssh!” She went on whispering. “You know—the ones I told you about—maps—with funny marks on them. You see, after Miss Murdle, I didn’t think that parcel was a bit safe, so I opened it, and when I saw there were maps I thought they might be frightfully important, and I thought I’d better take them out. And I thought if I put the parcel in the bank everyone would think they were still inside it, so I did it in rather a public sort of way, and they burgled the bank. So, you see, it took them in. But I can’t understand about Corne
lius. He said he was Cornelius. Isn’t he?”

  Antony said again, “Con’s dead. I told you. That’s a cousin—Barend Roos, one of their Fifth Column. But he’ll be for it now.”

  Inspector Lamb came out of the room.

  “I’d like to have your statement, Miss Merridew. We can go into one of the front rooms.”

  As they came through the hall they saw Ina Long. Through all the noise and disturbance she had not moved. She stood against the wall by the front door with her arms hanging and the tears running down her face. The constable stood beside her. Delia ran to her—put an arm round her—made her sit down.

  Shepherded into the drawing-room, she rushed to her defence.

  “You mustn’t do anything to her! You won’t—will you? They were frightening her sick. You don’t know how dreadful they were. And she’s got a perfectly good husband in hospital, and she doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive her, and it’s smashing her up. And there’s his practice, you know—she’s afraid he’ll be ruined if it gets into the papers.”

  The Inspector was very nice to Delia. He liked a girl to have what he called a feeling heart. A lot of girls didn’t seem to have any feelings at all. He was sympathetic, but he got her to the point and kept her there till she had made her statement and signed it. Then he went and telephoned a description of Jimmy Nash, after which he and Sergeant Abbott went off in a police car with Barend Roos and Ina Long.

  Delia and Antony drove away in the Hillman, but when they had gone about a quarter of a mile Antony stopped the car. The street was quiet as far as in it lay—houses all decorously blacked out, and the minimum of traffic. Guns were booming away to the east. Sometimes a shell rose like a star and burst above the black irregular line of the housetops. Neither Antony nor Delia had the slightest idea whether there was, officially speaking, a raid in progress or not. They were not thinking about raids—they were thinking about each other.